CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Bella Goldin and her fellow students are practicing again: chanting their prayers in Hebrew, reading verses from the Torah, going over every detail as they prepared for a ceremony that usually marks the coming of age of 12- and 13-year-old Jewish girls and boys.

But Bella, who comes to class in a wheelchair, is 100 years old. Most of the others are in their 80s.

Some have fading eyesight, others arthritic fingers. Two need oxygen tanks to breathe. Still, they have soldiered on every Monday for months. They were getting ready for something none thought they'd ever experience and, in the process, proving it's never too late to pursue a fuller life.

Last week at Charlotte's Temple Israel, with beaming children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren looking on, each of the women became an adult bat mitzvah "daughter of the commandment."

When they were girls in the first half of the 20th century, this rite of passage was reserved for 13-year-old boys, whose coming of age was celebrated with a bar mitzvah ceremony.

Times have changed. Bat mitzvah ceremonies are common today. And in the past few years, in places like suburban Cleveland, Boston and Charlotte, groups of elderly women at independent and assisted living facilities have also claimed the ritual, and its sign of full responsibility as Jews.

"I wanted to experience something I missed," says Ann Pruzan, the youngest member of the class at Charlotte's Sunrise on Providence assisted living community. She remembers feeling it was "unfair and bizarre" that girls were not treated the same as boys in the Brooklyn, N.Y., synagogue she attended as a child. This week, at 79, she'll get to do what her brother, husband and son did decades ago.

Many of the women in senior bat mitzvah groups across the country have waited even longer, with some now in their late 90s. Charlotte has one of the oldest of them all in Bella. This retired lawyer and teacher from New York, 5 feet tall and cracking jokes, reached the century mark five months ago and has been the anchor — and inspiration — of the Monday afternoon class.

"I'm happy — it's another step in my life," Bella says about finally being called, along with her classmates, to publicly read from the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). "I'm a little late, but I guess I got there."

The first reference to a bar mitzvah as it is understood today dates to the 16th century.

And the first bat mitzvah? 1922, in Manhattan.

The girl was Judith Kaplan, whose father — Conservative Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan — found the exclusion of girls troubling. So he did something.

"No thunder sounded, no lighting struck," Judith Kaplan told author Ari Goldman 70 years later. "The institution of bat mitzvah had been born without incident."

In the late 1960s and early '70s, with the rebirth of feminism, bat mitzvah ceremonies became common.

Though there are major female Jewish figures in the Bible (Deborah, Queen Esther), the role of women in Judaism centered, for centuries, on the home. Their activity in the synagogue was limited, and men and women were separated for prayer during services.

In recent decades, much has changed, especially in Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist congregations, where men and women worship side by side. The first female rabbi in the United States retired just three years ago; she was ordained in 1972.

"The three non-Orthodox branches of Judaism are truly egalitarian today," says Rabbi Murray Ezring of Temple Israel, a Conservative congregation. Ezring presided at the service featuring the seniors. Today, he says, "Girls take their place, lead the service, read from the Torah and the Prophets and they can do so whenever they wish."

Together, sounding practiced and swelling with a sense of accomplishment, the friends chanted the blessing that comes after reading the Torah:

"Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam, Asher natan lanu torat emet. ..."

"Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has given us the Torah of truth and planted eternal life within us. ..."